Lopsided odds aside, Bellator 90's Mo Lawal has his work cut out for him

And just like that, Mo Lawal’s turn on the Bellator wheel o’ fighting fortune has come around again.

A little more than a month after debuting in the light heavyweight tournament with a first-round knockout of Przemyslaw Mysiala, it’s fight time once more for the part-time pro wrestler and former Strikeforce light heavyweight champ, who meets Emmanuel Newton (19-7-1 MMA, 2-1 BFC) in the semifinal round of the Bellator 205-pound tournament in West Valley City, Utah, tonight (Spike TV, 10 pm ET).

If you believe the oddsmakers, Lawal-Netwon is tied for the week’s most lopsided fight in the world of MMA. Like the UFC’s Ronda Rousey, Lawal (9-1 MMA, 1-0 BFC) is as big as a 14-to-1 favorite with some sportsbooks. Newton? His opening round submission victory apparently wasn’t convincing enough because he gets to play the role of Liz Carmouche here, coming in as an 8-to-1 underdog against one of Bellator’s biggest free agent acquisitions in recent memory.

That puts Lawal in kind of a tough spot whether he wants to admit it or not. As the only name fighter in the Bellator light heavyweight tournament, he pretty much has to win it. That’s the predictable outcome, the one that would serve only to meet expectations, not exceed them. Anything else would be an upset, a letdown. In fact, victory alone might not be enough. You look at the field for this tournament, and it seems like a bracket that Lawal should demolish, even if he’s not setting the bar quite so high for himself.

“I obviously want to win the tournament, but I don’t know if I need to demolish it,” Lawal told MMAjunkie.com (mmajunkie.com). “If it happens, it happens. But just because a guy doesn’t have a big name, that doesn’t mean he’s not tough. Before Fedor [Emelianenko] and [Anderson] Silva were known, they were kicking some ass. Then they kicked the right ass and got a break.”

And that’s the tricky part: making sure that your ass does not become the right one for another fighter to kick. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, Lawal is obviously the man to beat in this field. Any of the remaining three light heavyweights would love to make a name for themselves with a win over him by any means necessary. On the flip side, even when Lawal scores a walk-off knockout, as he did against Mysiala in a fight in which he received no more significant damage than a scratched ear, fans simply write it off as the favorite doing what he was supposed to do.

It’s just that, according to Lawal, there’s a difference between being favored and being famous. Neither will win him fights, even if both turn each fight against a colossal underdog into a risky career prospect.

“The notoriety is nothing,” he said. “I might have been in the right place at the right time, and I have the personality to get noticed, but Jacob Noe‘s a tough guy. [Mikhail] Zayats is a tough guy. They’re just kind of quiet.”

Lawal isn’t. It seems like no accident that he’s the only participant in the Bellator light heavyweight tournament to also dabble in Spike TV’s TNA Wrestling, which, as you might have noticed, gets a pretty strong push on Bellator broadcasts. If the powers that be aren’t banking on Lawal winning the whole thing (he’s slated to make his pro wrestling return shortly after the tournament wraps up, he said), it sure seems like they wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it went down that way.

So what’s a prohibitive favorite to do? If smashing his way through this tournament isn’t enough by itself, what’s it going to take for Lawal to get into a fight where winning means more than just not being the victim of an upset?

It’s tough to say, but it might have to remain a question for another night. When you’re the big name draw who’s going off at Ronda Rousey odds, you’ve really got no choice but to try to live up to them.

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